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Pierre Lévy (Palestra na Conferência Doors of Perception 3)

O compartilhamento e transmissão de uma memória coletiva são fatos tão antigos quanto a humanidade. Tradição, técnica e sabedoria são passados de geração em geração. O progresso em técnicas de comunicação, começando com a invenção da escrita, até o registro do som e de imagens em movimento, aumentou muito essa reserva comum de conhecimento. Atualmente, a informação e outros manteriais geralmente disponíveis online ou no ciberespaço não consiste apenas do "depósito" desterritorializado de textos, imagens e sons, mas tamvém de opiniões hipertextuais sobre essas próprias informações, e grandes bancos de dados com poder autônomo de inferência, assim como programas de computador que podem ser usados para todos os tipos de simulação. A memória coletiva posta em ação no ciberespaço é uma memória dinâmica, emergente e cooperativa, retrabalhada em tempo real por interpretação, e deve ser claramente diferenciada do tradicional manuseio de histórias e técnicas e os registros estáticos armazenados em bibliotecas e arquivos públicos.

Uma das mais distintas peculiaridades da nova inteligência coletiva é a precisão com a qual ela é refletida nas inteligências individuais. Os atos da psique humana tornam-se quase tangíveis para os indivíduos. Certas formas de mundos virtuais quase tornam possível expressar e visualizar em tempo real os vários componentes de uma psique coletiva.

A empolgação desperta pela Internet é devida tanto à deslumbrante sensação de mergulhar em um cérebro comum quanto pelo potencial utilitário da busca de informações. Navegar no ciberespaço é adquirir um olhar consciente de uma interioridade caótica, perceber o contínuo e baixo rumor de uma agitação incessante, as banalidades e o relampejar global da inteligência coletiva. O acesso ao esforço intelectual do todo contribui com o trabalho de cada parte individual, seja um grupo ou uma só pessoa, que por sua vez alimenta o ciberespaço em sua totalidade.

Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace. New York: Plenum Trade, 1997. Translated by Robert Bononno.

Reviewed by Graham J. Murphy

Particularly important to the autopoietic bond of knowledge space and collective intelligence is the hypercortex, a pattern emerging from technology's ability to "promote the construction of intelligent communities in which our social and cognitive potential can be mutually developed and enhanced" (9-10). As it expands, the hypercortex will shape itself according to other networked brains, making contact with others and participating in the construction of virtual worlds. The knowledge space and its concomitant hypercortex is problematic, however, as humanity becomes "nothing more than a brain. Even his body becomes a cognitive system. But the brain shapes itself collectively, makes contact with other brains, with systems of signs, language, and intellectual technologies, it participates in thinking communities that explore and create multiple worlds. Thus, the brain of Homo sapiens sapiens turns in upon itself, unveils its obverse and transforms itself into a polycosm" (156). Lévy's evocation of the hypercortex as nothing more than a brain apparently deletes bodily markers from the posthuman equation; as a result, his vision treads dangerously close to a corporeal disavowal that has been postulated in some of the more animated postmodern and/or cybercultural musings. In defiance of disembodiment discourses popularized by, among others, Hans Moravec, Marvin Minsky, Arthur Kroker, or Jean Baudrillard, academics such as N. Katherine Hayles (How We Became Posthuman, 1999), Anne Basalmo (Technologies of the Gendered Body, 1996), and Mark Dery (Escape Velocity, 1996) have critically resisted and interrogated the loss or downplaying of the corporeal form with its multiple bodily inscriptions. Reading Lévy's account of cosmopedia, one can't help feel an alignment of Collective Intelligence with the former group over the latter, where a similar disavowal is taking place as bodily markers seemingly have no bearing on a hypercortexed intelligence. As with "The Ethics of the Social Body," the cosmopedia and hypercortex have troubling implications and a cyberspatial fencing at their conceptual core that necessitates a careful reconsideration of Lévy's utopia and the cost of such a connected intelligence.

Thinking at the Edge of the Galaxy:
Pierre Lévy’s World Projection
Terry Cochran
The human idea stands as the wall beyond which thought loses its significance; it marks the ideal limit of Lévy’s vision of contemporaneity as well as his historical exposition of how the contemporary constellation emerged. History, with its periods, its technologies, and the human mind swept along in its linear unfolding, exists in reference to this idea of humanity and its accompanying civilization. Thus, contemporary humanity gets a new face, manifests itself anew: “We are present at one of these rare moments when, by virtue of a new technological configuration, that is, a new relationship to the cosmos, a new style of humanity is being invented.”9 Trying to understand the import of this planetary plastic surgery gives rise to a host of images to depict the global mind, the interaction of its members, and its human identity in the face of the cosmos: “A whole cosmopolitan society thinks in us.”10 This vision gives a contemporary twist to Kant’s cosmopolitical notion of critical reason, representing a more advanced manifestation produced along the same historical trajectory and filtered through the human idea. For a more Frankensteinian tone, though still in the same vein: “We become . . . the neurons of a planetary hypercortex.”11 The human idea, an idealized point of reference that gives unity to the disparate components of history, reintroduces the rhetorical effects of a totalizing view of knowledge, which is all claims to totality ever were. The personification that the idea of humanity embodies seeps into all descriptions of contemporary collectivity, to the point of gracing it with immaterial gray matter. In modernity, personification, along with the idealization it enacts, is the figure of history par excellence, and Lévy’s account no more escapes the figure than it avoids the totalizing impulse.